


two truths and a lie

by howlikeagod



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s03e12 The Western Air Temple, Gen, a life-changing field trip in your own backyard!, casual bending, cool flips and stunts, let the standoffish but surprisingly vulnerable kids of nobility be FRIENDS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 10:24:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20655671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: "Okay, Zuko. Lie to me."Toph's feet are spared; Zuko accidentally has his first sleepover. Canon divergence from "The Western Air Temple."





	two truths and a lie

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a concept I've yearned and craved and longed to see for a literal decade. If you know of any similar fics please tell me about them... my crops are dying... please, I can't be the first person to think of this...

For once in his life, Zuko gets very, very lucky.

A rustling in the forest wakes him up. He was a heavy sleeper, once, but the kid who left his door wide open to the palace hall never lived on a rustbucket battleship or starved in the middle of an endless shrubland or pitched a makeshift a tent out of a war-balloon fifty feet above a group of people who nearly threw him off a cliff six hours ago. He’s learned to be jumpy; under the right circumstances, paranoia is indistinguishable from common sense.

The reflexive urge to throw out a band of fire into the dark night with no warning, though—that goes a step further into sheer stupidity.

“It’s me!” a young, high voice shouts. The cry breaks what was, a moment ago, a night full of only the quiet forest sounds that bleed and blur into a universal kind of ambient noise once you hear it enough. A sound like a landslide in reverse accompanies the shout.

Zuko rubs his eyes as a wall of stone falls away to reveal the Avatar’s friend—the earthbender. _Toph Beifong, _Zuko’s mind supplies, remembering the offensively high price Azula put on her head after Ba Sing Se.

It was more than _Zuko _was ever worth to the Fire Nation. It’s stupid to be jealous about something like that, but then again, Zuko is nothing if not a realist about himself these days.

“I’m sorry,” he cries, leaping to his feet. Even if she isn’t burned, he just attacked one of the very people he’s trying—and failing miserably: again, realist—to convince of his genuine desire to help. And if she _is _burned, he can kiss any hope of joining up goodbye, can kiss any hope of taking down his father or ending the war or ever doing anything more than wandering a wartorn wasteland of a world as a pathetic vagabond who, upon noticing he’d just dug his own grave, picked the shovel right back up a big, fat goodbye—

“Watch where you throw that stuff,” Toph gripes. She steps forward, out of the forest shadows and into the dim light of the dying embers of his campfire.

“It was a mistake,” Zuko pleads, fully prepared to kneel again and accept the weight of stone shackles around his wrists.

“I know,” she says testily. “Calm down, your heartbeat’s going crazy. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“I’m—” Zuko blinks. He was about to say the same thing. “Um. Thank you?”

“Don’t mention it. So,” Toph crosses her arms, “Zuko.”

She says just that, his name, and stands in agonizing silence. Years ago, Zuko read that the greatest earthbending masters were endlessly patient, as willing to wait as the forces of erosion that bent their element long before even the revered badgermoles tunnelled the earth. Toph is the first one he’s met who makes him truly believe it.

Zuko feels sweat at his temples. He swallows.

“That’s me,” he finally croaks. In his head, Uncle’s voice calmly repeats, _True humility._

Toph nods.

“Okay, Zuko.” She stomps one foot and a column of earth erupts behind her. She sits down, tosses one ankle over the opposite knee, props her chin in her hand, and says, “Lie to me.”

“What?”

“I said, lie to me. C’mon, it can’t be that hard to think of a lie. I’m sure you did it all the time when you were evil or whatever. Make it obvious, though. I like to have a baseline.”

Zuko’s eyes are still fuzzy from sleep, despite the adrenaline. He worries for a dizzy moment that this is a dream. But no, his dreams never cut him this much slack.

“My father is an honorable man,” Zuko says. He startles himself, but it isthe least true thing he can think of. “And I’m on his side.”

Toph is silent again. Zuko wonders if he has time to kick his own butt before she does it for him.

“Huh,” she says at last. “I guess it doesn’t run in the family.”

“What does that—?”

“Alright, Sparky,” Toph interrupts, “you said you wanted to be Aang’s firebending teacher?”

“Yes.” Zuko feels more than a little relief at the question. He’s been anticipating an interrogation all along. He isn’t _ready _for one, but he saw it coming.

“Why?”

“I— I think—” A tangled web of reasons flashes through Zuko’s head, running the gamut from _My father wants to follow an old family tradition, genocide, maybe you’ve heard of it? _to something raw and aching that starts with the words _My mother, _but none of it follows from the question he’s actually being asked, so he settles on, “It’s the right thing to do.”

“You _think _it’s the right thing to do?”

“No,” Zuko shakes his head. “I know it’s the right thing. I finally do. It’s taken me a long time to get there, but I know. I _think,_” he takes a deep breath, “that it’s my destiny.”

The night is dark and Toph’s hair falls over half her face, but Zuko has a sharp eye; she looks like she might be about to laugh at him.

She doesn’t.

“Destiny-schmestiny,” she scoffs. “What changed?”

“What? I don’t…” 

Toph jumps up off her stone stool and walks directly into Zuko’s space. He’s still half crouched, frozen between kneeling and making a break for it, so she stands a head taller than him.

“What.” She pokes him hard in the chest. “Changed?”

He knows what she’s asking. He knows he can’t lie to her.

“It’s a long story.” Zuko feels something pushing its way up his throat alongside the words, a bitter laugh or a sob. They don’t feel all that different.

“Look. I want to trust you.” Toph manages to turn an admission of trust—_vulnerability, weakness, _a dark little corner of Zuko’s mind still whispers as if they’re synonyms—into a blunt force attack. “I’m also the only one. Me. I’m your only in with the group, but I won’t get anywhere with the rest of those chuckleheads if you don’t give me something to work with. Got it?”

Zuko frowns at her tone. _Chucklehead _isn’t a term he ever expected anyone to apply to the Avatar, even if said Avatar is twelve and kind of flighty. Wait—he doesn’t intend the pun.

“I thought you were friends.”

Toph looks taken aback for the briefest second.

“We are,” she says. “They’re also stubborn idiots sometimes. You’ll fit right in.”

Zuko almost laughs. A huff of air sneaks its way from his mouth, at least. He’s not the only realist.

“I got everything I ever wanted,” he says in a low voice. “That’s what changed.”

The fire is all but dead. Zuko thinks about another fire, not so long ago. A beach. The concept of friends, and the reality of them in practice. He isn’t angry anymore—isn’t that strange.

“Princeliness didn’t live up to the hype, huh?” Toph shrugs. “Been there.”

She sits on the ground in front of Zuko. The earth shudders when she makes contact, like it’s trying to get out of her way. Cautiously, Zuko unfolds himself from his liminal pose and settles into a lotus position.

“I saw the truth about what I’d been trying to get back to for so long. I wasn’t the same person I was before I left, and I didn’t want to be.” Zuko passes a hand over the cold ashes of the fire. He doesn’t summon flame, but he brings the coals to glowing life. “I’d seen too much to believe the lies anymore.”

“Were you…” She trails off, hesitant for the first time. 

Toph fills the pause by grabbing a clump of dirt. She presses it between her palms, shapes and reshapes it into intricate figures—a platypus-bear, a tiny house, Avatar Kyoshi—with the precision of a master sculptor, years of careful work condensed into the blink of an eye.

Zuko waits.

“When we met you in that abandoned town,” Toph says at last. “The day your uncle got hurt.”

“I remember.”

“And then in Ba Sing Se.”

“I _remember.” _Zuko bites down on his tongue against the flare of his temper. “What’s your question?”

“You weren’t chasing the Avatar anymore, were you?”

“I—” 

The force that catches in Zuko’s throat is one he hasn’t felt since a slimy cavern under a lake, since one of the handful of times he can remember Uncle raising his voice: _Who are you? And what do _you _want?_

Because the trick of it is, he doesn’t know.

Zuko looks up from Toph’s steady hands, still thoughtlessly molding a clump of earth into fantastical images as fast as flickering firelight, to her face. He couldn’t meet her eyes even if he wanted to, and the fact is strangely comforting. People _stare _at Zuko; he’s used to it. He had almost forgotten what talking to someone feels like without the weight of their eyes on him.

Her face looks like porcelain in the dark—hard, he means, not fragile. But not _not _that either, though he wouldn’t dare say it out loud.

She’s… she’s _young. _She can’t be much older than Aang, if she isn’t younger. Younger, definitely, than Zuko was when he was banished. He wasn’t ready for any of it then: the loss of home and family and stability. Yet here’s Toph, and Aang, and all of them, carrying the same burdens and more.

“Yes or no?” she asks. The question is blunt, but this time, her voice isn’t.

“Not on purpose.”

It’s the truest way he can say it, accompanied by a wry twist of the mouth and a shrug. She can definitely sense the latter in some way, he knows that much about her precision and skill as a fighter, but the former might be for Zuko’s benefit more than Toph’s.

Her eyebrows quirk under her long fringe of dark hair. Toph surprises Zuko for the umpteenth time that night when she throws her head back and laughs.

Despite himself, Zuko feels an upward pull at the side of his own mouth.

“Okay,” Toph nods. “I’m in your corner, Sparky.”

“Just like that?” He can’t believe it. He really, honestly can’t.

“Just like that. But,” she raises a pointer finger, “let me do the talking. No offense, but you’re not exactly smooth.”

“I know.”

“Seriously. I’ve met your sister. Did she get all the social skills in the family or something?”

Any semblance of a smile drops off Zuko’s face. He pulls his knees up to his chest crankily.

“She got all the _everything,”_ he grumbles, like he’s a child again. Whatever—he’s _talking_ to a child; he can pout if he wants to. Nobody here can judge him more than he’s already been judged.

“Sheesh, struck a nerve there.” Toph scratches her armpit, then pitches backwards to land with a rumble that clatters Zuko’s teeth together. She folds her arms behind her head. “We can talk about something else if you want. Or not. I’m good with awkward silences.”

“You’re… staying here?”

“Gonna try to chase me away with fire again?”

“No,” Zuko says hurriedly. “It’s just. What about the others?”

“They’re asleep,” Toph says flatly. The _idiot _tacked onto the end is unspoken but clear. “If I bend a big hole in the wall while dragging the prince of the Fire Nation behind me in the middle of the night before anybody’s gotten their beauty rest, how willing do you think they’ll be to hear either of us out?”

“Right.” Zuko hadn’t thought about that. The clearing falls back into the rhythm of quiet forest sounds. “For the record,” he adds, “I don’t think I’m the prince anymore.”

“Weren’t you still the prince when you were _banished?_ How’d you mess up that bad?”

“I mean,” Zuko picks awkwardly at a patch of grass, “this time I shot lightning at my dad before I left.”

“You _what?”_ Toph sits bolt upright with an enormous grin stretching her round cheeks. “That’s awesome!”

The ghost of a smile comes back to Zuko’s face.

“Yeah, it kind of was.”

“I didn’t have time to do anything that cool before I ran away from my parents,” Toph says, laying down again.

“You ran away?”

“It wasn’t the first time. But yeah.” Toph’s small, solid hands clench into fists at her sides. “They thought I was weak.”

“Then they’re idiots.”

Zuko regrets it as soon as the words leave his mouth. He doesn’t know Toph, not really, and he certainly doesn’t know her parents. Still, even beyond the memory of how hot his shame once burned when his own father spat _Lucky to be born _in his face like a curse, the idea that anyone could _look _at Toph and not see her strength is ludicrous.

Toph doesn’t smile, and her voice is small when she says it, but Zuko catches a whisper in the quiet night. 

“Yeah, they kind of are.”

There isn’t much Zuko can think to say after that. He lies down himself, after a while, though he doubts he’s going to get much sleep with the promise of another attempt at joining the Avatar’s saving-the-world and part-time-Zuko-hate club in the morning. 

Lying flat on his back, the stars are familiar in the nameless way of childhood. He realizes it would be easier for him to chart a course by the sky above the Southern Sea or the wide belly of the Earth Kingdom, despite these being the constellations he was born under.

He assumes Toph is asleep. It shocks him out of his thoughts when her voice breaks the silence again.

“Zuko?”

“What?”

“Does it bother you that Aang is probably gonna kill your dad?”

Zuko’s throat goes tight. He swallows, breathes—

Breathes again. A faint burst of flame puffs out over his face, temporarily outshining the stars overhead. His father never taught him the breath of fire; that was Uncle. His father never taught him anything worth learning. That was Uncle, too.

“He’s not going to do anything to my father if he doesn’t learn firebending. Let’s get past step one first.”

“Yeah,” Toph yawns. “Good idea.”

This, Zuko thinks, might be the first time anyone's ever said _that_ to him.

“Toph!” Katara’s voice is high and maternal as Toph emerges from the tunnel in the back wall of the Temple’s stone courtyard. “Where have you been?”

“Here’s the thing,” Toph says. “I kind of went to talk to Zuko last night.”

Her friends erupt with disbelief.

“What?”

“Zuko?”

_“Eugh?!”_

“It was fine!” Toph insists. “Hear me out, okay—”

“Did he attack you?” Sokka demands. He’s moved past wordless shock and disgust to pure anger, overlaying the honed edge of a warrior’s pragmatism.

Toph’s voice goes hard.

“We just talked.”

“Actually,” Zuko says, stepping out from the shadowed depths of Toph’s tunnel shortcut, “I did.”

He won’t start this new chapter of his life on a lie. No matter what they think of him, he won’t be anything but honest.

Identically to yesterday, the moment of shock on all their faces turns to battle-ready stances—except Toph, who throws her head back with a frustrated groan.

“I _told_ you to let me handle it!”

“And _we _told you,” Sokka says darkly, “that if you didn’t leave, we’d attack.” The arm holding his sharpened boomerang swings back. Zuko can see the trajectory of it already. His head throbs with phantom pain from the last time he ended up on the wrong side of Sokka and his boomerang.

“Wait!” Zuko and Toph shout at the same time. 

“It was an accident,” Toph reassures her friends. Her jaw is set, though who exactly she’s angry at, he isn’t sure. “Tell them,” she tilts her head toward Zuko, “since you’re _so _eager to try your sales pitch again.”

“I—” Zuko clears his throat. _Humility, _he thinks, _the only antidote to shame_. “I firebent at Toph when she came to find me. It was a mistake. I was startled and nobody was hurt, but that doesn’t make it okay. Fire can be wild, and I need to work on controlling it. I’m sorry.”

His words don’t feel like enough. He adds two short bows for emphasis, one toward the rest of the group, then one toward Toph. Toph doesn't punch him, surprisingly.

Zuko doesn’t know what he expects—probably the impact of Sokka’s boomerang or the cold slap of Katara’s water. Instead, light footsteps approach him. He glances up to meet the Avatar’s eyes.

Aang’s deep, gray stare is thoughtful. Zuko has never known what to make of this boy; he is surprise after surprise, freedom and power and unpredictability. Zuko knows with a heavy certainty that whatever Aang says now will define the course of the rest of his life.

“I think,” Aang says, “you _are _supposed to be—”

He is cut off by, of all things, an explosion that rocks the foundation of the Temple.

As if he was summoned by Zuko’s slip-up yesterday, the assassin stands on a ledge across the gap between one tower and the next. Zuko clenches his fists as the group cries out and the man breathes in, readying another attack. He knows what he has to do.

Rounding the corner of the wall that provides their only cover, Zuko sprints as close as he dares toward the ledge.

“Toph!” he shouts over his shoulder. “I have to get up there!”

He plants his feet in preparation to jump and knows Toph can sense it.

“You want me to _what?”_

Her disbelief only wastes the precious seconds between the quiet popping Zuko can already hear and the detonation he knows will blast him into the gorge if this doesn’t work.

Zuko turns just enough to see her out of the corner of his eye. Sokka, Katara, and Aang all stare at him like he’s grown two heads or another scar. Toph looks doubtful, worried, but on the verge of—

“Just do it!” Zuko snaps.

“Oh,” Toph says as her expression morphs into a grin. “I’m gonna enjoy having you around, Sparky.”

She lunges forward with a heavy stomp, elbows pulled back. Zuko barely keeps his balance as the column of stone erupts beneath his feet. As he launches himself off the platform, buoyed along by the shockwave of the explosion met by Toph’s bending and hurtling through the air at near-terminal velocity straight toward a world-renowned assassin, Zuko smiles.

_Yeah, _he thinks. _Right back atcha._


End file.
